brandinghttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress
Lee Jones's BlogSat, 24 Mar 2018 17:43:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Their Men in Washingtonhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=573
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=573#commentsWed, 18 Jul 2007 21:52:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=221There’s an important article in Harpers Magazine, ‘Their Men in Washington‘, which is an expose of the Washington lobbying industry. Anyone who is reasonably well informed should know that lobbyists for industrial, commercial and other capitalist interests have enormous power and sometimes directly write chunks of legislation, but this article is about the way that foreign countries employ lobbyists to enhance their standing in the capital of the world’s remaining superpower.

I became aware of this practice as widespread relatively recently. In my adopted neck of the woods, Southeast Asia, for instance, Burma was nearly certified by the US for its counter-narcotics programme thanks to the hiring of the lobbying firm, DCI Associates, while after the 2006 coup d’etat, the military regime in Thailand hired a PR firm to help bolster its battered image.

The fact that this is so widespread, as the Harpers article makes abundantly clear, raises all sorts of questions about the nature of American politics – and Western politics in general, since although Washington is undoubtedly the golden trough for narrow special interest groups, the EU is certainly not much better and nor are its member-states – it also raises questions about the nature of international relations.

Studying the one area of the third world that has managed to undergo economic development is always interesting, albeit frustrating, because you have to adopt a view from the ‘semi-periphery’. The major Southeast Asian states are neither so powerful as to be able to often get their own way, nor are they so weak and poverty-stricken (like, say, Sub-Saharan African states) that they exhaustedly bow to Western pressure at the drop of a hat. Their mode of development is ultimately dependent: they are part of a deepening transnational network of production where often Japanese capital is used to establish cheap manufacturing and assembly plants where exports are made for predominantly the US market. Their reliance on a few areas for investment and market access makes them vulnerable, and their attractiveness as an investment location never quite recovered from the 1997-98 economic crisis vis-a-vis China.

What the ASEAN states have done since the crisis has been to accelerate the permanent revolution they had propagated prior to it, where they had projected themselves outwards as a viable, vibrant and competent regional grouping, capable of managing regional order and deserving of engagement with the great powers on the basis of sovereign equality. In the early 1990s, this meant creating the ASEAN Free Trade Area to attract investment, the ASEAN Regional Forum to prevent counter-proposals from Western states consign the Cold War-era organisation to irrelevance as they searched for a new multilateral forum for the Asia-Pacific, and taking a semi-leadership (de facto, thwarting) role in APEC. After the crisis they have tried all sorts of eye-catching initiatives, like the ASEAN Economic Community, the ASEAN Investment Area, the Hanoi Plan of Action, the Initiative for ASEAN Integration, ASEAN+3, the East Asian Summit, the ASEAN Security Community and dozens of other declarations and sub-regional cooperation agreements.

Barely a year goes by without some sort of grandiose announcement and if you just read the ASEAN documents, it would be easy to forget that these are ultimately a group of rather poor and weak countries whose average per capita income is just a few thousand dollars (excluding outliers like Singapore, where it’s higher than the UK) as they talk about ‘synergies’, ‘human resource development’ and ‘ICT’. The purpose of these schemes, for which the states launching them cannot possibly provide the resources to implement them, is occasionally revealed in loose language as a mechanism to ‘leverage’ funding from ASEAN’s ‘dialogue partners’. In other words, they are to a significant attempt grandiose efforts to convince the outside world that ASEAN is back in business – a dynamic, exciting and integrated place to invest in and trade with. This is not merely for show: a 2003 report commissioned from McKinsey insisted on the need to integrate ASEAN’s economies into a single market in order to have a hope of competing with China, and this has become the basis on which the leading ASEAN economies (particularly Singapore and Thailand) are basing their future development strategies, and the basis upon which the interests of the newer, poorer members (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Burma) are satisfied, through the injection of capital and the development of infrastructure under the integration rubric. Effectively (and again in grim times this becomes explicit) the states are pimping their economies via regional initiatives.

This – rather than sloppy culturalist assumptions about Asians’ need to ‘save face’ – helps explain why ASEAN sees so much at stake in political confrontations with the West, as in, say, over Burma. At peak moments, when ASEAN’s ‘image’ or ‘credibility’ is on the line, its members will tie themselves in knots to satisfy at least minimally Western demands while trying to appear as if they are in conformity with their supposedly inviolable norms, such as non-interference in each other’s affairs. This is an important part of the explanation as to why ASEAN has become so involved in the domestic politics of Burma – but also to some extent other cases like Aceh, East Timor and Cambodia.

What all of this suggests is that perceptions, images, reputations, are important: states recognise explicitly and implicitly the importance of how they are perceived and they incur significant costs to try to project and defend a particular image. I’d be interested to know if anyone has read anything interesting on this. All I’ve really come across is postmodern theorising by people like Peter van Ham who refer to this phenomenon as the ‘branding’ of the state, a deliberate attempt to gain commercial advantage, and claims this has always been happening, citing things like the shift from the fleur-de-lys to the tricolor as evidence.

Naturally what this overlooks is that such shifts are not the function of a clever marketing campaign led by a few executives sitting around a flip-chart but reflect profound, revolutionary socio-political upheavals. This is not to say that the ‘pimping’ that occurs under late capitalism is so profound, but to say that explanations that centre on ‘reputation’ must, perforce, be incomplete: you (think you) need a particular reputation in order to achieve some end; the question is therefore what end, and why that end, and the means to it, is selected. I don’t doubt states sometimes seek to ‘brand’ themselves and the Harpers article makes it perfectly clear there are powerful apparatuses providing services to help them. What’s more interesting is the reasons why they would want to do this in the first place.